I only recently ran across your Scala Creator vst. I wish it could somehow act as a host instead of as a vsti. Being able to load up a piano library and hear the sound as we changed the temperament would be very good.

I could make it so that it passes midi through I suppose, but I'm not really set up to make a standalone version of it unfortunately. Have you tried Cantabile Lite? This is the next best thing to standalone imo

Well, I have hosts. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the program. Now, it is a VSTI, so as you retune the strings, you can only hear the embedded synth playing, yes?

If adding the ability to pass through midi would mean that one could chain it in front of a sample library and then play the sounds sounds of the sample library and hear the retuning, and then save the Scala file, that would be very good.

Aaaagh sorry actually it would be impossible, midi can't convey all tuning data, plus it is device dependent. The whole point of scala creator is to create scala files to load into synths/samplers which support them. It was never meant to be a performance instrument, but rather simpler way of creating tuning files than the scala program.

All of my synths support scala files, and I think there are many out there that do... I think the scala website has a list of instruments which support them. Sorry to get your hopes up on that one it's been a long while since I thought about them!

Oh, I've used Scala off and on for five years, mainly for PianoTeq. However, I hate entering the numbers and then loading and testing the file, and then going back and changing the numbers, etc. I understand that many instruments support it. I simply like your idea of creating a more straightforward interface.

This is a bit off-topic, but I would love a good transposing/scale plugin that passes through midi and forces the slave VSTi to a defined key and scale. All the micro-tuning stuff is really beyond my needs, but it does seem related

This kind of Scala interface would be particularly valuable for piano libraries. Several problems arise when using Scala to build a temperament.

The largest problem is that Scala must rely on the fundamental of each note, but pianos are not tuned entirely on the fundamental because of the inharmonicity of the strings.

To me, the time it takes to revise a temperament in Scala, or to simply experiment, is the other impediment to using it. If the start of the temperament octave is set to A440, and one wants to hear the same temperament set to start on C, you must either create two temperament files for every temperament, or open Scala and manually make the change on the fly, and then reload the Scala file in the synth. This procedure would take about five minutes, whereas with a vst, one could just type in the start point for the temperament octave and hear the result in a very few seconds.

Scala is great, in other words, but was created before vsti's changed the universe.

"If adding the ability to pass through midi would mean that one could chain it in front of a sample library and then play the sounds sounds of the sample library and hear the retuning, and then save the Scala file, that would be very good."